Dr. Strangelove demystified: Disconnection of hand and language dominance explains alien-hand syndrome after corpus callosotomy.

Background: Alien hand syndrome (AHS) is a disabling condition in which one hand behaves in a way that the person finds "alien". This feeling of alienation is related to the occurrence of movements of the respective hand performed without or against conscious intention. Most information on AHS stems from single case observations in patients with frontal, callosal, or parietal brain damage.

Correction to: Routine diagnostics for neural antibodies, clinical correlates, treatment and functional outcome.

The original version of this article unfortunately contained a mistake.

Routine diagnostics for neural antibodies, clinical correlates, treatment and functional outcome.

Objective: To determine frequencies, interlaboratory reproducibility, clinical ratings, and prognostic implications of neural antibodies in a routine laboratory setting in patients with suspected neuropsychiatric autoimmune conditions.

Methods: Earliest available samples from 10,919 patients were tested for a broad panel of neural antibodies. Sera that reacted with leucine-rich glioma-inactivated protein 1 (LGI1), contactin-associated protein-2 (CASPR2), or the voltage-gated potassium channel (VGKC) complex were retested for LGI1 and CASPR2 antibodies by another laboratory.

Selective deep brain stimulation in the substantia nigra reduces myoclonus in progressive myoclonic epilepsy: a novel observation and short review of the literature.

We report the case of a patient suffering from pharmacotherapy-resistant bilateral progressive myoclonic epilepsy (PME) showing a beneficial response upon selective deep brain stimulation (DBS) of the substantia nigra pars reticulata. As an individual experimental therapeutic approach, we implanted DBS electrodes in the transitional zone between the subthalamic nucleus (STN) and the substantia nigra pars reticulata (SNr). Electrode placement allowed for a selective stimulation of either the STN, SNr, or both targets.

[Epilepsy And Driving Ability: The New Guideline].

The Swiss Guideline concerning epilepsy and driving has recently been revised. Recommendations have changed significantly in several respects. Some modifications arise indirectly from a change in the overall concept of epilepsy.

Right fronto-limbic atrophy is associated with reduced empathy in refractory unilateral mesial temporal lobe epilepsy.

Refractory mesial temporal lobe epilepsy (MTLE) is the most frequent focal epilepsy and is often accompanied by deficits in social cognition including emotion recognition, theory of mind, and empathy. Consistent with the neuronal networks that are crucial for normal social-cognitive processing, these impairments have been associated with functional changes in fronto-temporal regions. However, although atrophy in unilateral MTLE also affects regions of the temporal and frontal lobes that underlie social cognition, little is known about the structural correlates of social-cognitive deficits in refractory MTLE.

Right mesial temporal lobe epilepsy impairs empathy-related brain responses to dynamic fearful faces.

Unilateral mesial temporal lobe epilepsy (MTLE) has been associated with reduced amygdala responsiveness to fearful faces. However, the effect of unilateral MTLE on empathy-related brain responses in extra-amygdalar regions has not been investigated. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we measured empathy-related brain responses to dynamic fearful faces in 34 patients with unilateral MTLE (18 right sided), in an epilepsy (extra-MTLE; n = 16) and in a healthy control group (n = 30).

Where's the action? The pragmatic turn in cognitive science.

In cognitive science, we are currently witnessing a 'pragmatic turn', away from the traditional representation-centered framework towards a paradigm that focuses on understanding cognition as 'enactive', as skillful activity that involves ongoing interaction with the external world. The key premise of this view is that cognition should not be understood as providing models of the world, but as subserving action and being grounded in sensorimotor coupling. Accordingly, cognitive processes and their underlying neural activity patterns should be studied primarily with respect to their role in action generation.

Alterations in functional connectivity of the amygdala in unilateral mesial temporal lobe epilepsy.

The aim of this work was to evaluate the relationship between ipsilateral amygdala dysfunction in unilateral mesial temporal lobe epilepsy (MTLE) and remote temporal, frontal, and parietal brain structures and to identify their association with theory of mind (ToM) abilities. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data were acquired from MTLE patients with unilateral hippocampal sclerosis (n = 28; 16 left-sided) and healthy controls (HC, n = 18) watching an animated fearful face paradigm. To explore functional connectivity, we used independent component analysis (ICA) of fMRI data to characterize possible amygdala network alterations that may be caused by lateralized amygdala dysfunction.

"Tell me how do I feel"--emotion recognition and theory of mind in symptomatic mesial temporal lobe epilepsy.

Specific interictal personality characteristics in epilepsy, sometimes referred to as "Waxman-Geschwind Syndrome", have been recognized for centuries and extensively described. Despite the persevering clinical impression that patients with mesial temporal lobe epilepsies (MTLE) suffer from problems in communication and interpersonal relations, uncertainties and controversies remain as to the precise origin of these psychosocial difficulties. Here, we investigated social-cognitive and decision-making abilities using a set of tasks that combine behavioural and psychological measures of social and emotional variables to answer the question of whether patients with MTLE are specifically impaired in social cognition compared to both an epilepsy and a healthy control group.

Hippocampal contributions to the processing of architectural ranking.

Theories of rhetoric and architecture suggest that buildings designed to be high ranking according to the Western architectural decorum have more impact on the minds of their beholders than low-ranking buildings. Here, we used event-related potentials in a visual object categorization task to probe this assumption and to examine whether the hippocampus contributes to the processing of architectural ranking. We found that early negative potentials between 200 and 400 ms differentiated between high- and low-ranking buildings in healthy subjects and patients with temporal lobe epilepsy with and without hippocampal sclerosis.

Brain electrical responses to high- and low-ranking buildings.

Since the ancient world, architecture generally distinguishes two categories of buildings with either high- or low-ranking design. High-ranking buildings are supposed to be more prominent and, therefore, more memorable. Here, we recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) to drawings of buildings with either high- or low-ranking architectural ornaments and found that ERP responses between 300 and 600 ms after stimulus presentation recorded over both frontal lobes were significantly more positive in amplitude to high-ranking buildings.

Attention effects on sensory gating--intracranial and scalp recordings.

The function of sensory gating is usually studied in paired-click experiments and quantified by the decrease of the event-related potential (ERP) component P50 and other ERP components from the 1st to the 2nd stimuli. The impact of attention on these gating measures is still not fully resolved. In the current study, the impact of attention on sensory gating was studied by scalp and intracranial recordings.

Stimulation mapping via implanted grid electrodes prior to surgery for gliomas in highly eloquent cortex.

Objective: To evaluate whether preoperative mapping of higher cortical functions with subdural grid electrodes can help to maximize resection in functional areas and avoid permanent injury.

Methods: A consecutive series of 16 patients (female: n = 7, male: n = 9, mean age of 38 yr) with a history of seizures and without focal deficit was reviewed, harboring gliomas located in the dominant hemisphere adjacent to or in the F3 gyrus/Broca area (n = 11), parietal/perisylvian area (n = 5) and additionally the pre- or postcentral area (n = 15). All patients in this series were operated for cytoreductive purposes only and not for treatment of intractable seizures.

Limbic event-related potentials to words and pictures in the presurgical evaluation of temporal lobe epilepsy.

We recorded limbic event-related potentials (ERPs) with intrahippocampal depth electrodes in a more demanding verbal and an easier pictorial continuous recognition task in patients undergoing presurgical evaluations of their medical refractory mesial temporal lobe epilepsies (MTLE). In all cases depth electrodes were implanted because non-invasive studies could not demonstrate unilateral seizure-onset unequivocally. For the present study we only considered 24 patients who eventually were found to suffer from unilateral MTLE, in whom hippocampal sclerosis (HS) was confirmed histologically, and who were seizure-free post-operatively.

Intracranially recorded memory-related potentials reveal higher posterior than anterior hippocampal involvement in verbal encoding and retrieval.

The human hippocampus is essential for both encoding and recollection, but it remains controversial whether there is a functionally different involvement of anterior versus posterior parts of the hippocampus in these memory processes. In the present study, we examined encoding and retrieval processes via intrahippocampal recordings in 27 patients with unilateral temporal lobe epilepsy. Multicontact depth electrodes were implanted along the longitudinal axis of the hippocampus as part of the presurgical evaluation.

Gender specific processing of eye contact within the human medial temporal lobe.

Eye contact is a powerful social stimulus for human and non-human primates. However, it is unclear whether brain mechanisms that interpret eye contact are sensitive to gender. Here we show that human brain responses to eye contact are indeed gender specific.

Hippocampal event-related potentials to tone duration deviance in a passive oddball paradigm in humans.

The mismatch negativity (MMN), a component of event-related potentials (ERPs), is assumed to reflect a preattentive auditory discrimination process. Although an involvement of hippocampal structures in deviance detection was shown in animal experiments, invasive recordings in humans have not been able to provide such an evidence so far. In the current study, ERPs were recorded from intrahippocampal and scalp electrodes in 16 epilepsy patients.

Towards a functional topography of sensory gating areas: invasive P50 recording and electrical stimulation mapping in epilepsy surgery candidates.

The filtering of sensory information, also referred to as "sensory gating", is impaired in various neuropsychiatric diseases. In the auditory domain, sensory gating is investigated mainly as a response decrease of the auditory evoked potential component P50 from one click to the second in a double-click paradigm. In order to relate deficient sensory gating to anatomy, it is essential to identify the cortical structures involved in the generation of P50.

Mesial temporal lobe epilepsy impairs advanced social cognition.

Purpose: Although memory, language, and executive functions have been extensively studied in patients with mesial temporal lobe epilepsy (MTLE), investigations into advanced social cognitive abilities have been neglected. In the present study, we investigated the ability to detect social faux pas and studied possible mediating clinical and demographic variables in patients with MTLE compared with patients with an epilepsy not originating within the MTLE and healthy controls.

Methods: The 27 MTLE patients (16 were investigated pre- and 11 postoperatively), 27 patients with an extramesiotemporal epilepsy (except frontal lobe epilepsy), and 12 healthy controls performed a shortened version of the faux-pas test.

Novelty detection and encoding for declarative memory within the human hippocampus.

Intracranial recordings of cognitive potentials within the human hippocampal system have identified N400 potentials in the anterior mesial temporal lobe (AMTL-N400) that correlate with verbal memory performance and are associated with novelty detection. Their amplitudes to "new" but not "old" words in a verbal recognition task correlate with the neuronal density of the hippocampal CA1-region and can be reduced selectively by the NMDA-receptor blocker ketamine. Moreover, it could be shown that NMDA-receptor dependent long-term potentiation (LTP), a form of synaptic plasticity with Hebbian characteristics, can be readily induced in human hippocampal slices but not in patients with hippocampal sclerosis.

Mid-latency auditory-evoked responses and sensory gating in focal epilepsy: a preliminary exploration.

The relationship between epilepsy and psychosis is not well defined. Sensory gating is a possible endophenotype for psychosis, and has not been fully examined in epileptic patients. The authors examined 29 patients with focal epilepsy who were on antiepileptic medications, and 29 age-matched healthy comparison subjects, using a paired-stimulus (S1-S2) paradigm.